It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this was a necessary step to protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers.

A publisher's site may not have invalid clicks or impressions on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks and/or impressions generated by:

- a publisher on his own web pages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking programs or any other deceptive software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the
layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

These or any other such activities that violate Google AdSense Terms and Conditions and program polices may have led us to disable your account.

Now, I'm not even going to bother to dispute this, seeing as how I'm almost certain that I changed the code to affect the text color of the ads (I can't remember; it's been so long) and I've probably said something along the lines of "click these ads to support the site!" at one time or another. In fact, even if I hadn't, that clicking the ads supports the site arguably goes without saying -- because why the hell else would I display shitty advertisements for things that mostly have nothing to do with the article content on the pages? (Way to go, target words.) Granted, every now and then they've been on-target -- Who North America advertises through Google, so I'm pretty sure I've clicked those links in the Dalek articles -- but alas! Doing so means that I've generated invalid clicks even though I was genuinely interested in the merchant. Argh.

Anyway, I was planning to get rid of the ads fairly soon -- I hate them, but one needs to generate $100 in order to receive any payment and the site was like $4 away from finally reaching that target number ONE YEAR LATER -- but I think it is very interesting that Google chose to disable the account now, seeing as how any "invalid activity" or whatever has been going on since I first signed up waaaay back when. Oh well. It's also telling that despite my account supposedly being disabled, the ads continued to display (as opposed to, say, some blank or error message coming up) until I nixed the code from the pages. When I get around to doing more layout tweaks, I'll maybe make a new donation image or put something else cool at the bottom of articles to fill up more space.

So Scary-Crayon is once again ad-free (except for our own ads, I guess), which I guess is how things should always have been given my obvious disdain for ads. Thanks for enduring those mostly irrelevant and useless ads for the past year -- I am deeply sorry for menacing you with that shit, especially given that it has ultimately not helped to support the site in the least. Such a fucking waste, but I'm almost glad that it turned out this way. Keep your terrorist dollars, Google.

Very suspicious. A friend of mine who uses google ads got that email when she was a dollar or so away from $100. She disputed it though and they apparently let her keep doing the program. Sounds like a ploy to me. Assholes.